Once Incendiary, a Book Debuts Quietly in a Reshaped Nation

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Sonia Gandhi with her son, Rahul Gandhi, as Mr. Gandhi arrived to file his candidacy for an election in 2014. Last week in India, a book about Mrs. Gandhi was released, five years after its author declined to have it published because of a political uproar. CreditDaniel Berehulak for The New York Times

By Nida Najar

Jan. 21, 2015

NEW DELHI — Five years ago, the release in India of “The Red Sari,” about the president of the then-governing Indian National Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, was unthinkable. Mrs. Gandhi was considered by some the de facto prime minister of the country, and her loyalists were incensed by the book’s contents, which they said was riddled with lies. They burned effigies of its Spanish author, Javier Moro, in Delhi’s streets, and according to the Spanish publisher, lawyers representing the Gandhi family threatened a lawsuit.

Amid the uproar, the author decided against publishing in India. But last week, nearly five years and one political upheaval later, the 429-page book that spans Mrs. Gandhi’s life — from her birth in a small town near Turin, Italy, to her marriage into an Indian political dynasty and her ascent as the Congress Party matriarch — was quietly released in India. Although there was an initial flurry of press, the publication was met mostly with public silence from Congress Party backers, the latest indicator of how much, and how quickly, the political climate in the capital has changed since the party took a drubbing in national elections last spring.

The images of Mrs. Gandhi, clad in a sari, that once dominated the capital have now been replaced by posters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party. And once-ubiquitous news about the Congress Party, which was in power for 10 years, has largely receded to newspapers’ inside pages, when it appears at all.

With the switch in power, Pramod Kapoor, who heads Roli Books, the Indian publisher of “The Red Sari,” said he had felt a change in atmosphere. He said the Congress Party’s foot soldiers were “quieter, and softer” than before, and friends no longer approached him to warn him that the party was unhappy about the book, as they had years before.

Mr. Kapoor called Mr. Moro, the author, to see if he might be ready to have the book printed in India, and Mr. Moro agreed.

The book first raised hackles in part because it belongs to an indistinct genre blending reporting with imagined conversations between Mrs. Gandhi and her family and advisers. Mr. Moro calls it a “dramatized biography.”

But Elena Ramírez, the director of Seix Barral, the imprint of the Barcelona-based Grupo Planeta that published the book in Spain in 2008, said the Congress Party’s objections went deeper, with party lawyers particularly objecting to portions of the book that detailed Mrs. Gandhi’s modest background. “She grew up in a very little town in Italy where there were goats, and her father was working in the country and they were very humble,” Ms. Ramírez said. “They told us that was completely offensive.” Mr. Moro said that the Congress Party objected to the book because, in a country where her foreign birth was a political liability, it delineated her Italian origins.

During the years when Congress was in power, Mrs. Gandhi was a figure of reverence, respectfully referred to as simply “Madam” and shaded from public scrutiny. She spearheaded the party’s election comeback in 2004, and then declined to become the prime minister of the country, though many believe she exercised considerable power over Manmohan Singh, who governed the country for a decade.

She is also a deeply private figure long considered off-limits by her own party. When she left the country for treatment of an ailment in 2011, the circumstances were shrouded in secrecy, and even her detractors would not pry. When she declined the prime ministership in 2004, hundreds of Congress Party rank-and-file members swarmed her house, some signing pleas in blood, others threatening suicide.

In a recent interview, Abhishek Singhvi, a lawyer and Congress Party spokesman whom Mr. Moro said led the charge against the widespread release of the book, declined to say much about what he objected to, although he did say that the work was largely fictional, a point he believed Mr. Moro did not make clear enough.

“He diminishes Indian democracy and the world’s most vibrant court system by insinuating that the Congress blocked his book,” Mr. Singhvi said in a telephone interview on Monday.

When asked if the party had threatened suit at the time, Mr. Singhvi said, “We said we reserve our rights whether we were aggrieved.”

For his part, Mr. Moro acknowledged that part of the reason he waited to publish in India was because he wanted an English edition to come out in the West, which represents a bigger market than India. But he also said the party had made it too difficult for him to publish the book in India earlier, and that the tug of war over the book delayed the English language edition.

“They even sent messages to my publishers in Europe saying they were going to ask for the withdrawal of the book from bookstores,” he said. “Singhvi was very successful in the strategy of scaring away all English-language publishers.”

Ms. Ramírez confirmed that Mr. Singhvi had made many demands, but the only one the publisher met was for a disclaimer in the book, noting that it was unauthorized by the Gandhi family.

For Mr. Kapoor, the Indian publisher, the delayed release of the book in India had its own drawbacks. “I would have loved to publish it when Congress was in power,” he said. “More than now, because when they’re in power, more people want to read about them. We would have sold more copies.”

Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Book on Sonia Gandhi, Once Incendiary, Debuts Quietly in a Reshaped India. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe